Eddie Van Halen walked into a pawn shop looking for old parts when the owner tried to sell him a broken guitar for $5. What the owner said next was something Eddie never forgot. It was a Thursday afternoon in March 1977 and Van Halen was 6 months away from releasing their debut album. The band had a recording contract, a producer, and a stack of songs that were going to change rock and roll.

What they didn’t have was money, not yet. The advance from Warner Brothers had covered studio time and basic living expenses, but Eddie Van Halen was still the kind of person who hunted pawn shops and garage sales for spare parts. Old tuning machines, bridge saddles, pickup rings, anything he could use in the instruments he was constantly building and modifying at home because buying them new from a music store was a luxury he hadn’t earned yet.

He had grown up this way. His father, John, a musician himself, had taught both Eddie and his brother Alex the value of making things work with whatever was available. Eddie had built his first serious guitar almost entirely from salvaged components, learning by necessity how to identify quality underneath cosmetic damage, how to hear potential in something that looked defeated.

Pawn shops were not to Eddie Van Halen places of last resort. They were places where interesting things ended up when nobody recognized them anymore. The shop was called Pasadena Exchange and it sat between a dry cleaner and a check cashing place on Colorado Boulevard. Eddie had been in twice before, both times finding nothing useful, but always taking 20 minutes to look anyway because that was the kind of person he was, someone who believed that the thing worth finding was usually in the place nobody else bothered to check. The owner, a heavy-set man in his 50s named Roy Pittman, kept a decent rotating stock of musical equipment alongside the usual pawn shop inventory of cameras, jewelry, and power tools. Eddie made a habit of checking in whenever he was in the neighborhood, running a mental catalog of what had changed since his last visit. That Thursday, he pushed through the door at just after 2:00 in the afternoon

wearing his standard uniform of the era, tight black jeans, a worn T-shirt from a concert he’d worked crew on 2 years earlier, and boots that had seen better decades. His hair was dark and thick and somewhat chaotic. He looked like what he was, a young musician in his mid-20s who was very good at something the world hadn’t fully discovered yet.

Roy Pittman was behind the counter talking to a customer about a reel-to-reel tape machine. He glanced at Eddie and held up one finger, the universal signal for wait a minute, and went back to his conversation. Eddie didn’t mind. He moved through the shop the way he always did, slow and methodical, hands in his pockets, eyes scanning the walls and shelves.

There were the usual instruments, a couple of student-grade acoustic guitars with warped necks, a banged-up trumpet, a violin with a cracked top, a ukulele missing two strings. None of it was what he was looking for. Then, he saw it. It was propped in the far corner of the shop leaning against the wall like something that had given up.

A solid-body electric guitar, clearly old, painted in what had once been a deep cherry red, but was now closer to a faded pink in places, worn down to bare wood at the edges and along the back of the neck. The headstock had a chip out of it. Two of the tuning machines were replacements that didn’t match the others.

The pickguard was cracked down the middle and held together with a strip of electrical tape that had been there long enough to leave a permanent shadow on the plastic underneath. There was no price tag on it. Eddie crouched down and looked at it without touching it for a full 30 seconds. Then he stood up and waited for Roy to finish with his customer.

When the man with the tape machine finally left, Roy came around the counter with the relaxed authority of someone in his own kingdom. “You find anything?” Roy asked. “What’s the story on that one in the corner?” Eddie said. Roy glanced over his shoulder. “That thing? Guy brought it in 8 months ago.

Couldn’t tell me what it was, couldn’t prove ownership on anything decent, so I gave him 12 bucks for it and figured I’d research it later.” He shrugged. “Never got around to it. It’s been sitting there. I was going to toss it in the clearance bin.” “How much do you want for it?” Roy looked at the guitar the way you look at something you’ve stopped seeing.

“Five dollars,” he said. “It’s broken, the electronics are shot, and one of the tuners doesn’t turn anymore. I don’t even know if the truss rod works. Honestly, it’s not worth a serious guitarist’s time.” Eddie looked at him for a moment. Then he said, “Can I pick it up?” Roy gestured with open hands.

“Be my guest.” Eddie walked to the corner, crouched down, and picked up the guitar with both hands. He didn’t plug it in. He didn’t strum it. He just held it, turned it over slowly, ran his thumb along the neck, looked at the headstock from two different angles, pressed on the body in three places, and held it up to the light from the front window.

He ran a fingernail lightly along the binding where it met the top. He sighted down the neck from the headstock end the way a carpenter sights down a piece of lumber. He tapped the body once softly near the upper bout and listened to what came back. The tap test was something Eddie had learned from an old repairman in Arcadia named Frank DeLuca who had worked on instruments for 40 years and believed you could diagnose most structural problems with your knuckles if you knew what sound you were listening brace gave a dull, papery thud. Good, solid structure rang with a brief, clear note even unplugged, the wood still resonant, still holding tension the way it was built to hold it. This guitar rang. Roy watched this from behind the counter with the mild curiosity of a man watching someone examine something he’d already written off. “This is a 1958 Gibson ES-335,”

Eddie said. He said it quietly, almost to himself, still looking at the headstock. “First year of production, one of the earliest thin-line semi-hollow electrics Gibson ever made.” Roy blinked. “That thing?” “The finish is gone and the electronics need a complete rebuild,” Eddie said, “but the body is solid, the neck joint is tight, the bracing underneath is intact.

” He pressed the body lightly again near the lower bout. “You can feel it. There’s nothing collapsed in there.” Roy came around the counter and stood next to Eddie looking at the guitar with entirely new eyes. “How much is it worth?” Roy asked. The question came out differently than he intended, with a note of something close to anxiety.

Eddie set the guitar down carefully against the wall in the exact position he’d found it. “Restored and properly set up?” He thought for a moment. “You’re looking at somewhere between 800 and 1,200 dollars. Maybe more depending on who does the work and who wants it.” He paused. “Unrestored as is to the right buyer who knows what they are looking at, probably four or 500.” Roy stared at the guitar.

Then he looked at Eddie, really looked at him for what was probably the first time since he’d walked in. “Who are you?” Roy asked. “Eddie Van Halen,” Eddie said. “I play guitar.” The name meant nothing to Roy Pittman in March 1977. Van Halen hadn’t released anything yet. There was no album, no radio play, no reputation outside of the circuit of clubs and parties and word of mouth that had been building for years in Southern California.

Eddie Van Halen was to Roy a young guy in worn-out boots who apparently knew something about old guitars. “You want it?” Roy asked. “Still $5.” Eddie looked at the guitar for a moment. Then he looked at Roy. “You should sell it for what it’s worth,” Eddie said. “Find someone who restores vintage Gibsons.

There are three or four guys in the valley who’d pay you a fair price and do right by it.” He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a folded piece of paper and a pen, wrote down two names and phone numbers, and handed it to Roy. “Call either of them. Tell them what you’ve got.

Don’t let anyone talk you below 300 for it as is.” Roy took the paper. He looked at it. He looked at the guitar. He looked at Eddie. “Why are you telling me this?” Roy asked. “You could have bought it for five bucks and flipped it yourself.” Eddie picked up a set of old tuning machines from a bin on the counter, the parts he’d actually come in for, and set them down in front of Roy.

“How much for these?” “Two dollars,” Roy said, slightly dazed. Eddie put two dollars on the counter. “I came in for parts,” he said, “not to take advantage of somebody who didn’t know what they had.” He took the tuning machines and walked toward the door. Roy Pittman stood behind his counter holding a piece of paper with two phone numbers on it and looking at a guitar he’d been about to throw in a clearance bin.

And he felt something he hadn’t felt in a long time, the particular discomfort of realizing you’ve been operating with a blind spot so large you’d stopped noticing it. He thought about all the instruments that had passed through his shop over 11 years. He thought about the ones he’d priced by gut feeling, by appearance, by how beaten up they looked rather than what they actually were.

He thought about how many Roy Pittmans there were in the world moving things out the door for five dollars because they didn’t know what they were holding. He called the first number on the list that same afternoon. A vintage guitar restorer named Pete Haskell came in the next morning, spent 45 minutes with the ES-335, and paid Roy 420 dollars for it on the spot.

Four months later, that same guitar, fully restored, the cherry finish brought back, new period-correct electronics installed, all six tuning machines matching, sold at a vintage instrument dealer in Hollywood for $1,100 to a studio musician who played it on three albums over the next decade. Roy Pittman never forgot the name Eddie Van Halen.

When the debut album came out in February 1978 and the radio started playing Running with the Devil and then Eruption became the thing that every guitarist in America was talking about, Roy pulled out the memory of that Thursday afternoon and turned it over like an object he was still trying to identify.

He told the story for years afterward. Not as a story about being foolish. He’d made $420 on a guitar he’d paid 12 for, which by any measure was a good day. But as a story about the Thursday afternoon a broke young musician in worn out boots walked into his shop, identified a 1958 Gibson ES-335 by touch and sight in under a minute, gave an honest appraisal without being asked, and then handed him the names of two people who could give him a fair price instead of offering him $5 and walking out the door with a $1,000 guitar under his arm. Roy had been in the pawn business long enough to know that people didn’t do that. The logic of the transaction was simple and universal. You paid what the seller would accept, not what the thing was actually worth. That was the entire foundation of the secondary market. It wasn’t dishonest. It was just the way things worked. Except that afternoon a 22-year-old guitarist in a worn concert T-shirt decided it wasn’t the way things

needed to work. Not for him. Not that day. He could have had it for nothing, Roy told people. Five bucks. I would have thanked him for taking it off my hands, and he didn’t even consider it. Eddie Van Halen used the tuning machines he bought that afternoon on a custom guitar he was building at home in his bedroom.

A black and white striped instrument that he was designing entirely around a new playing technique he’d been developing for 3 years. Something that used both hands on the fretboard in a way that nobody had approached systematically before. The body was an ash blank he’d bought from a lumberyard. The neck was from a Fender parts bin.

The pickups were rewound to his own specifications by a technician in Burbank. Every component had a story involving a pawn shop, a scrap bin, or a phone number written on a piece of paper by someone who knew something. That guitar eventually became one of the most recognized instruments in rock history.

The tuning machines Roy sold him for $2 held their tuning perfectly for years. Some things that look worthless turn out to be exactly what they are, and some people who look like nobody turn out to be exactly who they are. The difference, Roy Pittman learned that Thursday, is usually a matter of knowing what you’re looking at and having the integrity to tell someone else the truth about it, even when the easier thing would be to say nothing and walk out the door $2 poorer and $1,000 richer.

Roy kept the piece of paper with the two phone numbers on it for the rest of his life. He never threw it away. It was still in his desk drawer when he retired and closed Pasadena Exchange in 1994, 17 years after a young man in a paint-stained jacket stopped on his way to the door and decided that $5 wasn’t the right price for something worth a great deal more.